Archives
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. - NYTimes.com
“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”
Computing News — laura
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Quote
But a culture that doesn’t value it’s librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?
- Neil Gaiman
The Sandman: The Kindly Ones
General — laura
Friday, August 15, 2008
Getting The Most Out Of Your Library
Digital Web Magazine - Getting The Most Out Of Your Library
Library Links — laura
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Free copyright license upheld Fed Circuit Court of Appeals
Free copyright license upheld Fed Circuit Court of Appeals - Boing Boing
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.
Copyright — laura
Friday, August 8, 2008
Tell Congress to rein in DHS travel abuses
Tell Congress to rein in DHS travel abuses - Boing Boing
The ACLU has set up a form that makes it easy to tell Congress to overhaul the broken terrorist watch list and to require reasonable suspicion for electronic searches at the border.With no suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download all your private information — including your personal and business documents, emails, phone calls, and web history. The Department of Homeland Security confirms that this is the official policy.
What happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos? Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol — which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security — can simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on to it indefinitely.
Unfortunately, seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.
Just last month, the U.S. government’s “terrorist watch list” surpassed one million names and is growing by over twenty-thousand names per month. The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans — many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your name might be on the list, but there’s no way to know for sure until you are delayed — or even detained for hours in a back room. If you discover your name is on the list, it’s nearly impossible to get off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. No joke. An Act of Congress.
These abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects, with no rule of law and no accountability.
Patriot Act — laura
